Tax Reform May Give With One Hand But Take With The Other

WASHINGTON — Since the tax bill passed Congress, the air has been filled with complaints from businesses about the horrors it will rain upon them.

Individuals, on the other hand, are as happy as an ostrich with its head in a sand dune, eagerly awaiting the tax cuts promised them by Reagan, Rostenkowski, Packwood & Co.

According to the drafters, everything is black and white: Corporations will see their tax burden rise by $124 billion in the next five years, while individuals will see their tax bite fall an equal amount.

Those estimates, coming as they do from our government's revenue ministers, sound so tidy that they have triggered my innate defense mechanisms against proselytizing. Help me in my unbelief, but I believe they're wrong.

Behind my blasphemy is the rather

simple notion that corporations, as rational entities interested in their own preservation, will respond with self-protective measures that ultimately will offset, in whole or in part, the individual tax cuts.

To my surprise, I have found a sizable cult of other nonbelievers, including Michael Drury and Roger Fulton, economists for A. Gary Shilling Co. in New York. Drury is not a word-mincer. The tax bill, he maintains, will be ''crushing to wages.''

Their reasoning goes like this: In the old days, corporations would fend off tax increases by raising prices. It was easy to do that when people weren't worried about inflation. But in the new competitive world marketplace, in an era when everyone is more inflation-conscious, that old remedy is no longer open.

The only other alternative is to ''beat up on workers,'' in Drury's words. To avoid paying higher taxes, corporations will launch cost-cutting campaigns. One thing often overlooked is that the superstructure of fringe benefits has existed on the foundation of high corporate tax rates. Now that the top corporate rate is to be reduced to 34 percent, Drury noted, companies will find those benefits a fruitful area for exploitation.

Norman Ture, a former Treasury Department tax official, said he can foresee many companies going on ''search and destroy missions'' to reduce their costs. Economist Allen Sinai at Shearson Lehman Brothers Inc., the New York investment-banking concern, said that is all rational behavior. He predicts that the workers who will feel the most pain are those at big smokestack companies that enjoyed large tax incentives in the past.

The tax bill was sold to the public on that grounds that it would provide a real tax cut, something that we could go out and spend. Corporations, it was thought, would not especially mind a higher tax burden because people would have money to buy their products. With consumer demand all around, they could start producing and making profits again.

That has been called the reverse trickle-down theory or the trickle-up theory, whichever you prefer.

If corporations think like individuals, and I believe they do, they are impatient with any theory that trickles on them.

In the back of my mind is the feeling, unscientific perhaps, that today's wage structure is tied in closely with the old tax system, with its high tax rates.

One convincing argument that workers often made for a healthy pay boost was that, because the government and inflation took such a big bite out of purchasing power, it was hard to get ahead. To keep workers happy, corporations were frequently persuaded by that argument.

Now those underpinnings have been removed. Inflation is under control, and tax rates are down.

You will get your tax cut, but you may lose something equally valuable.